ASUS announces the Strix GPU family

29 May 2014

By Wesley "CataclysmZA" Fick

ASUS seems to have something for every chassis these days. If the 30-plus motherboards on retail, or the multiple variations of the GTX760, or their DirectCU II coolers alongside their Matrix designs didn’t tickle your fancy, then it most definitely has something for anyone looking to be a little different with the Strix family. Strix is a new cooler design that is separate from their other ideas and it looks pretty damn cool. The design debuts on a custom Radeon R9 280, which is almost, but not quite, a rebranded HD7950, as well as a custom Geforce GTX780. Hit the jump for more pixel porn.

The Strix R9 280 OC isn’t too far from a reference R9 280. It packs in a standard 1792 stream processors (28 Compute Units), 112 TMU (texture units), 32 ROPs (raster operators) and 3GB of GDDR5 memory on a 384-bit interface. The stock clocks out of the box are 980MHz for the GPU and 2.6GHz (5.2GHz effective) for the memory. The magic, instead, is in the cooler and the heatpipe solution, which ASUS says offers incredibly low noise levels.

The GTX780 Strix OC is a little more custom than the reference Nvidia design, packing in a total of 6GB of GDDR5 memory. It uses the same cooler design, together with identical fans and heatsinks. Clock speeds are 889MHz base, 941MHz for boost speeds and the memory is set at 6008MHz, just like most of the other Geforce cards based on Kepler. Both the GTX780 Strix and the Radeon R9 280 pack in two DVI ports, one HDMI 1.4a and one Displayport 1.2 connector.

The real benefit to the Strix coolers and the chief reason why one would pick them is because of the cooler. The fans spin down when the card’s temperature is under 65° Celsius, but will spin up above those temperatures to keep the card cool. Unlike most fan profiles, the cooler’s job isn’t to keep the GPU under 65° C, but to just be silent when chewing through low-level workloads like working on the desktop or in a few 3D applications that don’t need much power.

ASUS has not announced when the Strix versions of these cards will be available, but they will be showing them off at Computex 2014, with a launch probably following in late June or mid-July.

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